Byd d'occasion

BYD started in 1995 as a battery maker in Shenzhen, supplying the cells inside the world's mobile phones, and only bought a car company in 2003. The name stands for Build Your Dreams, and founder Wang Chuanfu's dream was simple: if you own the battery, you own the electric car.

Warren Buffett bought in early, the Blade Battery of 2020 made lithium iron phosphate safe and cheap enough for mass production, and in 2022 BYD stopped building pure combustion cars altogether. Within two years it had overtaken Tesla as the world's largest maker of electric vehicles.

In Europe BYD sells the Dolphin, Atto 3, Seal, Seal U and the Sealion 7, with the compact Dolphin Surf as its entry point and a Hungarian factory coming to build them locally. The strategy is vertical integration on an industrial scale: batteries, chips, motors and even the ships that carry the cars.